F. Greenbaum & Associates has worked with clients in the following areas:

Advertising
Brand Imagery/Strategy Development
Children and Teen Research
Innovation Facilitation and Name Generation
International Research
New Product/Service Development

Advertising

We have helped clients develop, evaluate and track advertising. Our expertise includes character development (for children).

• A cereal company wished to develop a new spokescharacter for their brand. Using stories and simple visuals, we explored very young children's interest in different characters.

• An airline wished to develop a special club for children. We worked with the advertising agency to develop creative direction and stimuli, including characters, stories, games, and toys and tested these with children and mothers through qualitative research.

Brand Imagery/Strategy Development

• A telecommunications company wished to identify a new strategic direction and market position prior to deregulation. Qualitative research explored this company's current 'place' in consumer perception and potential new positions.

• A client wanted to understand the relationship of chocolate in the baking process. The objective of the research was to develop a new communication strategy. The four groups of respondents baked their favorite chocolate recipes and brought these to the groups. The first group shared their experience and we explored all the emotional and rational reasons for using chocolate in cooking. We learned about the different forms of chocolate that they used to understand how these fulfilled their 'baking' needs. We took the results from this first group and wrote a range of positioning statements. During the next three groups we kept refining these statements with group participants until we identified the key positioning statements with the broadest appeal.

Children and Teen Research (sample projects)

• A client developing a new snack bar wished to identify which ideas had the greatest appeal among children and which of these would pass their mom's seal of approval. We interviewed children on their own, parents on their own and parents and children together (to understand the 'nag' factor from both child and mom perspective).

• A company wished to understand how well children were following The Canada Food Guide as well as their levels of exercise. This was a diary study.

• A soft drink company wanted to understand what teens valued and related to develop more relevant advertising. We wanted 'leading-edge' teens, so we recruited participants by sight at malls. Participants were given disposable cameras. They came to the groups with pictures of people and things that they felt defined who they were. They also created time capsules of what they wanted to remember about themselves today.
  

Innovation Facilitation and Name Generation (sample projects)

We use brainstorming and projective techniques when working with clients to generate new product/service ideas. We use similar techniques with consumers when we want to go beyond rationalization.

• A cereal company wished to reposition their brand with teens. An innovation session was conducted with the marketing team where, for homework, they went on 'mall crawls' with teens to get their perspective on clothes, fashion, music, .

• New innovations were required to revitalize involvement in a food category. We facilitated a first hand understanding of current usage of this product category by interviewing heavy users of this product category with the manufacturing/marketing team observing in the back room. The following day we conducted a brainstorming session with the client team to build new ideas/innovations for this category.

• We have conducted naming workshops for major clients including Canadian Tire, Kraft Canada, Cara Foods, Beaver Foods, Nestle, Ault Foods, Pillsbury, and Burroughs Wellcome.
  
  

International Research (sample projects)

• We have conducted research all around the world. One US client wanted to understand the affect of a new product formulation on consumers in Australia. We designed the quantitative study and questionnaire, managed the supplier in Australia, analysed and reported the findings.

• Another client wanted to identify a global brand strategy for two of their products in diverse countries, including Russia, Japan, Philippines, Thailand, Spain, Portugal, Brazil, Mexico, US (including Puerto Rico), Canada.

New Product/Service Development

F. Greenbaum & Associates has facilitated the development of products and services in the following categories: Confectionary, Dairy, Pharmaceuticals, Soft Drinks, Snacking Products, Airline Industry, Financial/Insurance Industry, Telecommunications, Internet, etc. New product development services include Brainstorming, Concept Development, Qualitative and Quantitative Assessment.

Here are a couple of examples:

• A confectionery company wished to expand its product base to include chocolate-based products. Client innovation identified a range of new product ideas. These were tested and expanded upon with consumers, ranging in age from teenagers to adults. Innovation techniques were used in the qualitative research. The ideas that appeared to show the most potential were developed into simple concepts and tested quantitatively. The objective of the quantitative research was to identify a pool of ideas with the greatest potential for R&D to develop.

• A dairy company wished to understand how it could market a milk-based product popular in Europe but virtually unknown in Canada. This product could be processed into different products, from sweet to savory, as we discovered in an Innovation session with marketing and R&D. We took some of these ideas and developed them further with consumers in qualitative research sessions. The refined ideas were tested quantitatively. Names and positionings were developed for the idea that demonstrated the greatest potential in quantitative research. This idea was further refined through qualitative research prior to market launch.